1984

BY: GEORGE ORWELL

In one line: An all-time classic and stark reminder to beware of government overreach and Authoritarian leadership…we are closer to a 1984-like world today than we’ve ever been at any point in history, with surveillance capitalism (among plenty of other things) at our doorstep.

• War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
• Of course, he always chanted with the rest. It was impossible to do otherwise. To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing was an instinctive reaction.
• Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past.
• The best books are those that tell you what you already know.
• How can you make an appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper could physically survive?
• The thing that suddenly struck Winston was that his mother’s death, nearly 30 years ago had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible. Tragedy he perceived, belonged to the ancient time. To a time when there was still privacy, love, and friendship. And when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason. His mother’s memory tore at his heart because his mother died loving him at a time when he was too young and selfish to love her.
• In moments of crisis, one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against ones own body. Even now, in spite of the gin, a dull ache in his belly made consecutive thought impossible. It is the same he perceived in all seemingly heroic or tragic situations—on the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for, are always forgotten because the body swells up until it fills the universe, and even when you’re not paralyzed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment to moment struggle against hunger, or cold, or sleeplessness. Against a sour stomach or an aching tooth.
• The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they need not be distributed. And in practice, the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare.
• The essential act of war is destruction. Not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, or too intelligent.
• Oceania – Reality only exerts its pressure through the needs of every day life. To eat and drink, to get shelter and clothing. To avoid swallowing poison or stepping out of top story windows. Between life and death and between physical pleasure and physical pain, there is still a distinction, but that is all.
• Doublethink – the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind at the same time and accepting both of them. The party member knows in which direction his memories must be audited and therefore knows they are playing tricks with reality.
• All past oligarchies have fallen from power, either because they ossified or because they grew soft. Either they became stupid and arrogant, failed to adjust themselves to changing circumstances and were overthrown or became liberal and cowardly. Made concessions when they should have used force. To rule, and continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality. For the secret of rulership, is to combine a belief in one’s own fallibility with the power to learn from past mistakes.
• If human equality is to be forever averted, if the “high” as we have called them are intended to keep their places permanently, then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled-insanity.
• Of pain you should wish only one thing, that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain, there are no heroes.
• No one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means. It is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution. One makes the revolution, in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of power is power.
• With the development of machines however, the case was altered. Even if it was still necessary for humans to do different kinds of work, it was no longer necessary for them to live at different social or economic levels. Therefore, from the point of view of the new groups, and on the point of seizing power, human equality was no longer something to strive after, but a danger to be averted.
• Those were false memories, products of self deception. How easy it all was. Only surrender, and everything else followed. It was like swimming against a current that swept you backwards however hard you struggled and then suddenly, deciding to turn around and go with the current instead of opposing it. Nothing had changed, except your own attitude. The predestined thing happened in any case. You hardly knew why you had ever rebelled. Everything was easy, except anything could be true.